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понедельник, 31 октября 2011 г.

Klout Score from Klout.com - Do we need it?

It’s being stated that we all live in quite competetive atmosphere most of the time, which is, perhaps, why the way we are accepted by others turns out to be a highly essential aspect.

Here, I’m not even talikng about mundane routine, like what your spouse, or children or close friends are percepting you, and whether they appreciate your actions, or not. The importance of being treated in a good or at least tolerant way takes the whole universal scale and happens to be related to our colleagues, or bosses, or social network pals who might never meet in real life.

To say, the critical essentiality of being valued, certainly affected by our phychological strivings to be loved and cared about, doesn’t only presuppose the smiles on people’s faces, friendly hugs and numerous “thumbs up’s” in Skype from you old friend Paul, or John, or anyone else.

The thing is that this critical essentiality is also related to our initial desire to dominate and get more power, if not in the actual physical sense of the word, then in more spiritual way – that is gain a sort of influence over the others. We open our accounts in Twitter, Facebook, or a file-sharing site, like 4shared. We add friends, and sometimes even accept the friend requests from people we’ve got no idea about.

In this respect, a more or less new internet service Klout.com is what will enable you to track the amount of influence you actually possess over your web audience. The service will count you special Klout Score that defines how much your activity, opinions, or whatever on different topics has an impact on your friends, subscribers or followers. In such a way, as it’s suggested you can find the way to increase your score by vising the site more, inviting your friends, or simply posting more interesting content, which will be further shared, retweeted, liked and commented.

Having tried Klout.com myself, I was a bit disappointed, or wasn’t I? At first glance, it looked fun, but was it useful? I doubt that, and here’s why:

1) If you can increase your Klout score simply by opening the official site more, can the actual influence on others be even talked about? Just the site-visitor counter, perhaps.

2) Your Klout score checks only the social network activies, but doesn’t take other activities of your into account. That is, no matter how popular I am within themed software forums, for instance, no matter how many times my shared documents and apps are downloaded at 4shared, I still get the disappointing 12,71 Klout score.

Anyway, for those, who are into every single appearing web service or gadget, Klout.com should be more, than fun to try. Yet, its usability is far more overestimated, from my point of view. It’s definitely losing to more powerful rivals on the market. May be, because it’s much younger, than others, may be because it’s been created just to have something created.